Wounds can occur from various types of cuts, abrasions, burns including sunburn, surgical incisions, pressure ulcers, diabetic ulcers, lesions and other injuries or maladies, both chronic and non-chronic. The healing rate of a wound can be improved by controlling the environment around the wound during the healing process. Many wound treatments involve cleaning the wound and debriding it, and often, covering it with a wound dressing to help it heal faster.
Commonly used wound dressings include gauzes, foams, sponges, cotton wads or other fibrous materials. Gauzes and other fibrous materials are used to absorb fluids by capillary action to remove exudates from the wound and prevent influx of bacteria and other pathogens while the wound heals. Often, wound dressings are normally draped over the treatment site and held in place by sutures or adhesives. However, the suturing of these wound dressings in place is often tedious and time-consuming and not desirable in many body sites. Adhesives used in wound healing are normally used external to the body and not applied directly to the damaged tissue but to adjacent healthy tissue because they must be removed. Sometimes tissue can grow into the wound dressing as the wound heals, but this tissue is torn when the wound dressing is removed causing injury to the wound, which causes further delays in healing.
Other materials have been used alone or in conjunction with wound dressings, such as gels hydrogels, granules and pastes to promote wound healing by keeping the wound bed moist, cleaning the wound, and also removing necrotic matter from it by fluid donation. These materials may also absorb exudate from the wound. However, there is a need to develop improved wound healing therapies that enhance wound healing.
Anabolic agents are a class of pharmaceutical compounds known to the medical profession for their properties of increasing muscles mass and body weight. These properties of building up muscle mass and weight are beneficial for patients with decreased muscle mass and weight loss experienced in patients with conditions such as cancer, HIV or other muscle wasting syndromes. Anabolic steroids also have been used by the medical profession to stimulate puberty and growth in children and for hormone replacement therapy.
Anabolic steroids can be represented by the following general structure:

Testosterone is an example of a naturally occurring anabolic steroid that exhibits the above general structure except it has a double bonded oxygen at position 3 of the A ring and a hydroxyl group at position 17 on the D ring. Many modifications of the above general structure to various positions in the A, B, C and/or D rings have been made to increase binding activity to the steroid receptor and to increase lipid solubility of the anabolic steroids and prolong its activity. For example, alkylation at 17-alpha position with methyl or ethyl groups create orally active compounds because it slows the degradation of the drug by the liver. Esterification at the 3 and/or 17 positions allow the anabolic steroid compound to be activated in the blood stream when parenterally administered and also increases the duration of effectiveness by increasing the lipid solubility. Alterations of the ring structure also allow different anabolic steroid compounds to have different anabolic to androgenic effects.
Although anabolic agents are conventionally used to increase muscles mass and body weight, to date, they have not been widely appreciated for local administration for wound healing. Therefore, there is a need for improved medical devices and methods comprising an anabolic agent for wound healing.